The 2025 Princess of Asturias Award for Literature recognizes Eduardo Mendoza's body of work as a novelist. Set largely in Barcelona, his fiction mixes elements of Gothic fiction, science fiction, and crime writing with humor, satire, and parody to explore the contradictions of city life and society. A sequence of major novels beginning with The Truth About the Savolta Case forms the core of a career that has now spanned half a century.

From Barcelona, he has kept returning to the city and its contradictions through humor and satire.